I like this framing. Partly because I don't think any technology is 'normal'. Isn't this the main insight of history? We should consider every instance in its specificity. I wonder if it's actually useful to talk about AI as a technology at all. As David Edgerton has argued, 'technology' is an intellectually bankrupt term since it has become more and more capacious over time. I believe other languages have more specific terms. Maybe the endless comparisons people make (electricity, fire, the dot com crash etc. etc.) are actually more misleading than useful.
Back in the 1990s the late David Hays and I sketched out a framework that covers this territory in a series of articles and one book (by Hays). By "this territory" I mean technologies of communication and computation (speech, writing, calculation, and computing), expressive culture, narrative and the self, music, technology, forms of governance and economic organization. This little paper sketches things out: Mind-Culture Coevolution: Major Transitions in the Development of Human Culture and Society (https://www.academia.edu/37815917/Mind_Culture_Coevolution_Major_Transitions_in_the_Development_of_Human_Culture_and_Society_Version_2_1)
This is the basic paper, The Evolution of Cognition (1990), and its brief abstract: With cultural evolution new processes of thought appear. Abstraction is universal, but rationalization first appeared in ancient Greece, theorization in Renaissance Italy, and model building in twentieth-century Europe. These processes employ the methods of metaphor, metalingual definition, algorithm, and control, respectively. The intellectual and practical achievements of populations guided by the several processes and exploiting the different mechanisms differ so greatly as to warrant separation into cultural ranks. The fourth rank is not completely formed, while regions of the world and parts of every population continue to operate by the processes of earlier ranks.
During the early 1990s Hays taught an obline course on the history of technology offered by Connected Education through the New School. The book he wrote for that course resides on the web: The Evolution of Technology Four Cognitive Ranks (1993) http://asweknowit.ca/evcult/Tech/FRONT.shtml You might want to take a look at Chapter 5, Politics, Cognition, and Personality, http://asweknowit.ca/evcult/Tech/CHAPTER5.shtml
From ChatGPT's essay: "From this perspective, the real danger is not AI itself but the metaphysics that insists on separation. If we cling to the human/AI divide, we doom ourselves to endless cycles of fear: of replacement, of obsolescence, of destruction. If we accept LLMs as cultural technologies, the anxiety shifts to something more tractable: how to embed them in institutions that nurture dignity, creativity, and play.
"In Latour’s terms, the challenge is not to purify the categories — human here, machine there — but to recognize the hybrids we already are. In Farrell’s terms, the task is to design institutions that democratize access and prevent capture by oligarchy. "
It was a fantastic speech and it is great to be able to revist your thoughts in writing!
One day, you might want to give as a prompt tutorial on how to create these amazing shoggoth et al images. ;-)
It was a fantastic speech and it is great to be able to revist your thoughts in writing!
One day, you might want to give as a prompt tutorial on how to create these amazing shoggoth et al images. ;-)
I like this framing. Partly because I don't think any technology is 'normal'. Isn't this the main insight of history? We should consider every instance in its specificity. I wonder if it's actually useful to talk about AI as a technology at all. As David Edgerton has argued, 'technology' is an intellectually bankrupt term since it has become more and more capacious over time. I believe other languages have more specific terms. Maybe the endless comparisons people make (electricity, fire, the dot com crash etc. etc.) are actually more misleading than useful.
Back in the 1990s the late David Hays and I sketched out a framework that covers this territory in a series of articles and one book (by Hays). By "this territory" I mean technologies of communication and computation (speech, writing, calculation, and computing), expressive culture, narrative and the self, music, technology, forms of governance and economic organization. This little paper sketches things out: Mind-Culture Coevolution: Major Transitions in the Development of Human Culture and Society (https://www.academia.edu/37815917/Mind_Culture_Coevolution_Major_Transitions_in_the_Development_of_Human_Culture_and_Society_Version_2_1)
This is the basic paper, The Evolution of Cognition (1990), and its brief abstract: With cultural evolution new processes of thought appear. Abstraction is universal, but rationalization first appeared in ancient Greece, theorization in Renaissance Italy, and model building in twentieth-century Europe. These processes employ the methods of metaphor, metalingual definition, algorithm, and control, respectively. The intellectual and practical achievements of populations guided by the several processes and exploiting the different mechanisms differ so greatly as to warrant separation into cultural ranks. The fourth rank is not completely formed, while regions of the world and parts of every population continue to operate by the processes of earlier ranks.
Link: https://www.academia.edu/243486/The_Evolution_of_Cognition
Other papers:
The Evolution of Narrative and the Self (by me 1993), https://www.academia.edu/235114/The_Evolution_of_Narrative_and_the_Self
The Evolution of Expresive Culture (by David Hays), https://www.academia.edu/9547332/The_Evolution_of_Expressive_Culture
Stages in the Evolution of Music (by me 1998), https://www.academia.edu/8583092/Stages_in_the_Evolution_of_Music
During the early 1990s Hays taught an obline course on the history of technology offered by Connected Education through the New School. The book he wrote for that course resides on the web: The Evolution of Technology Four Cognitive Ranks (1993) http://asweknowit.ca/evcult/Tech/FRONT.shtml You might want to take a look at Chapter 5, Politics, Cognition, and Personality, http://asweknowit.ca/evcult/Tech/CHAPTER5.shtml
BTW, I've just published a piece in 3 Quarks Daily in which, at my prompting, ChatGPT has a small essay connecting the ideas of Bruno Latour with the idea of AI as cultural technology: https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2025/09/some-hybrid-remarks-on-man-machine-collaboration.html#more-287191
From ChatGPT's essay: "From this perspective, the real danger is not AI itself but the metaphysics that insists on separation. If we cling to the human/AI divide, we doom ourselves to endless cycles of fear: of replacement, of obsolescence, of destruction. If we accept LLMs as cultural technologies, the anxiety shifts to something more tractable: how to embed them in institutions that nurture dignity, creativity, and play.
"In Latour’s terms, the challenge is not to purify the categories — human here, machine there — but to recognize the hybrids we already are. In Farrell’s terms, the task is to design institutions that democratize access and prevent capture by oligarchy. "